2010 will be remembered as the breakthrough of cloud computing. This was the year people gained a shared understanding of the concept, and most major players were investing heavily into its expected transformative effects. Nobody personify the rise of the cloud hype more than Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Entering 2010 he was known to ridicule cloud computing in public rants.

The blogosphere was flooded with sarcastic comments when Microsoft announced the future Windows Azure Platform Applicance offering at WPC earlier this month, quickly dubbed “Azure-in-a-Box”. eBay and large datacenters will implement Windows Azure cloud infrastructures in large server centers, supported by HP, Dell and Fujitsu.  But cloud in a box sounds like a contradiction, right? Cloud computing was supposed to provide endless scale and elasticity, how could you get this if confined to a single container? 

 I think the more dogmatic cloud prophets are missing the larger point. Yes, global clouds provide scale benefits and reduce cost– but the BIG disruption is the potential of a standardized application platform across public and private domains. So, what will this do?